Monday, September 15, 2008

Last weekend, I was able to join my good friend, Amanda, and her family at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. Bryce and Amanda were taking a family vacation in the bay area and it was so fun to see them!The Winchester Mystery House is a house that used to be owned by Sarah Winchester, the heiress of the Winchester Rifle fortune. She had a daughter die at 6 weeks and her husband died of tuberculosis. She was told that their deaths were caused by the spirits of those killed by Winchester Rifles, so to appease the spirits, she needed to build this house. As long as she was building, she would have life, but as soon as she stopped, she would die. The legend says that you could hear carpenters hammer 24 hours a day from 1884 until her death in 1922. It grew from an 8 bedroom farm house to a 160 bedroom mansion. At it's tallest, it was 7 stories high and is now 4 stories high. Some of that continuous building was pretty ridiculous, as you can see...what else are you going to constantly build for 40 years!?! (As you can see, I used my sweet self-portrait-taking skills learned in China a lot on this little excursion...hope you don't get sick of my ugly mug.)

A cupboard with a half inch of storage space...

Sarah Winchester was only 4'10'', so lots of doorways are really small. Remember: I'm only 5'7''.

Outside of her mansion... I look photoshopped...I'm not. Stairs that lead to the ceiling... A beautiful stained-glass window that cost nearly $1500 (that was a LOT of money then...okay, it's a lot of money now...) and should cast a beautiful prism into the room. But, it was installed on the north part of the house where there is never direct sunlight AND rooms were built on the other side of it, blocking any potential sunlight anyway. Hmmm...

Mrs. Winchester was pretty obsessed with the number 13. Lots of rooms have 13 windows or 13 candles in the chandelliers or 13 sections of a wall. All of the clocks in her house are set to 13:13. She had some pretty cool (and expensive, I was told...) wallpaper... Me and cupid... the gardens were beautiful... A "door to nowhere." There was lots of this kind of stuff. Doors that led to walls or that didn't have floors below them so you would have fallen right through!My favorite part was this sign I saw as I drove away. It's for a mobile home community right NEXT DOOR to the mansion. Kind of ironic...